Pretty is beside the point at Dandelion Dancetheater

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JEZEBEL KUONO'ONO LEE AND DANDELION PERFOMERS ON THE CATWALK DURING "NIGHT MARSH."

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JEZEBEL KUONO'ONO LEE AND DANDELION PERFOMERS ON THE CATWALK DURING "NIGHT MARSH."

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NUDE05
JEZEBEL KUONO'ONO LEE AND DANDELION PERFOMERS ON THE CATWALK DURING "NIGHT MARSH."

NUDE05
JEZEBEL KUONO'ONO LEE AND DANDELION PERFOMERS ON THE CATWALK DURING "NIGHT MARSH."

Pretty is beside the point at Dandelion Dancetheater

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"Why do I care if it's pretty?" asks one of the costumeless Dandelion Dancetheater dancers, while two other unclothed women perform an athletic duet. Eric Kupers, co-director, choreographer, video and text producer for the company, finds inspiration in wrinkles, folds, dimples, cellulite, scars, pimples, freckles, bruises, hair and fat. He's all about the actual body, not some idealized form. After a three-year series of residencies at the Jon Sims Center for the Arts, Dandelion Dancetheater presented "Night Marsh" on Saturday night, the culmination of the Undressed Project, in which a cast of 15 performs in a "diverse ecosystem of naked bodies."

Kupers manages to jam the postage-stamp-size playing space at the Jon Sims Center with a lot more than flesh. In a ritualistic manner, the piece offers clearly rendered movement themes, video, music, ideas about nature and death, a sense of humor and the kind of frank display of body parts that might well get a person banned in Dubuque.

In San Francisco, where there is little that audiences haven't seen, the use of nudity requires a deeper motivation. For Kupers and Dandelion, nudity is a choreographic tool, never a gimmick, a means to explore movement as well as the fears and self-limitations the performers carry regarding their own bodies. With its multiaged, multirace, semi-professional, nonstandard-shaped cast, the troupe presents dancers as real folk -- an artful group catharsis for real people. However, if the performers are amateurs for the most part, it is in their hard-won lack of self-consciousness that this perfectly flawed group of performers holds enormous power.

In a review of the company during a tour of India in 1998, a writer asked, "Is not art, especially in the American context, a substitute for religious experience, or a struggle to discover something beyond the ordinary?" "Night Marsh" answers this question, in its limitations as well as its assets. A duet between two men and a prosthesis becomes fluidity with a kick, while the vast, lumpen backside of another dancer offers a living, breathing screen on which to project images of a different back, a smoother surface. Each shape offers its own beauty.

"Night Marsh" is also about death, thus, the title suggests, a "sense of vibrant growth coexisting with incessant decay." "How strange to depend on something that bleeds." The work is gritty rather than sensual, low-budget in the best ways. It's the kind of home-grown art that revels and reveals through intimacy and lack of pretense. The dancers are at once a cohesive tribe and separate bodies, divergent aspects of nature.

Night Marsh The culmination of the Undressed Project, presented by Dandelion Dancetheater, in association with Jon Sims Center for the Arts and the National Queer Arts Festival 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. $10- $15. Jon Sims Center for the Arts, 1519 Mission St., San Francisco (415) 554- 0402.